Livia Bitton-Jackson was an author of Hungarian origin and a Holocaust survivor. She was born as Friedmann Elvira, Elli L. Friedmann in Samorin, Czechoslovakia. At the age of 13, she and her family were taken to Ghetto Nagymagyar. They were eventually transported to Auschwitz, the largest German concentration camp, where her aunt perished but her brother survived. She, her mother, and brother were liberated in 1945.

Bitton-Jackson came to the U.S. on a refugee boat in 1951 to join her brother, who was studying in New York. She pursued higher education at New York University, where she earned a Ph.D. in Hebrew Culture and Jewish History. She authored her 1997 memoir, I Have Lived a Thousand Years.